by Gillian Gill
In a letter to Clive Bell, probably from the spring of 1903, soon after they came down from Trinity, Stephen enthusiastically urges Bell (at this point “Cambridge” men always used surnames among themselves) to read Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. This, my reader will remember, is the comedy in which the female protagonist, Lysistrata, seeks to convince the women of Athens that they could end the Peloponnesian War if they would only refuse to sleep with their men until a peace is negotiated. In his letter to Bell, however, Stephen chooses to cite a passage from the play that has nothing, or nothing apparently, to do with the central theme of women attempting to exercise power:
Have you read the Lysistrata of Aristophanes? It is beyond glorious throughout and there is one passage that pleased me more than a little. ‘Once upon a time there was a certain youth called Melancthon who fled from marriage and departed to the desert and dwelt upon the mountains; there did he hunt the hare—aye he had a certain dog—and never did he come back to his home for the loathing he felt. So did he hate all the female [illegible] and so do we like Melancthon—all we who are wise.’ Rather a locus classicus that I think for hunting with Artemis rather than yielding the heart to Aphrodite.
So, even as young Thoby Stephen was sizing up the pretty heiress Irene Noel as a possible wife and mother to his children while relieving his sexual needs—if we are to believe his sister’s account in Jacob’s Room—with artists’ models and typists, he advocates the simple ascetic life of the celibate huntsman, far from the snares of Aphrodite. He yearns in fact for the life sung by Swinburne in the poem “Atalanta in Calydon,” which he had bellowed forth in the Great Court at Trinity a few years before.
Thoby Stephen’s jejune espousal of the life of the mythical, solitary male huntsman shows that “Cambridge” men, gay and straight, carried an atavistic hostility to women into the new Bloomsbury experiment. Can we wonder, thus, that Clive Bell never expanded upon his single sentence, attesting that, if Bloomsbury had two fathers—himself and Thoby—it also had two mothers—Thoby’s two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia?
Virginia Woolf, of course, as a woman, and one who had never even been to school, much less university, was supremely “phenomenal,” in Apostle jargon, and this fact became clear to her on a visit to Cambridge in 1909. Already an established journalist in London and a well-known wit, Virginia Stephen was staying with her old friends the Darwin sisters in their home on Silver Street in Cambridge, and was taken for tea at Trinity College. There she found herself in the rooms of James Strachey, the younger brother of her good friend Lytton Strachey. James had called in his fellow undergraduates Harry Norton and Rupert Brooke to help him cope with the female Darwin party.
Thanks to all the biographical minutiae that have been published about the men associated with the Bloomsbury group, we now know quite specifically that, at the time of the Darwin tea party, these three young men were embroiled in a complicated, absorbing gay triangle. Harry Norton was madly in love with James Strachey, who was passionately in love with Rupert Brooke, and Brooke, the gorgeous red-blond idol of Trinity men and Newnham women alike, was trying to figure out where his sexual inclinations might lie. It is unclear how far Woolf was aware that this trio of young men was seething with passion, but she saw that they were struggling to maintain even a surface politeness toward women visitors, and recorded this in her notebook:
The three young men sat in deep chairs; and gazed with soft intent eyes into the fire. Mr. Norton knew that he must talk, and he and I spoke laboriously. It was a very difficult duet; the other instruments keeping silent. I should like to account for their silence; but time presses and I am puzzled . . . these young men are evidently respectable; they are not only “able,” but their views seem to me honest and simple. They lack all padding; so that one has convictions to disagree with, if one disagrees. Yet, we had nothing to say to each other; and I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticized. They wished for the truth and doubted whether a woman could speak it or be it.
Intuitively Virginia Woolf had put her finger on the philosophical version of misogyny that undergirded the ancient varsity world of her father, her brothers, and so many of her close friends in Bloomsbury. In Cambridge, women and the pursuit of truth were antithetical. It was that simple and that basic.
❧
Having, as the saying goes, “gone up” as freshmen, after a mere twenty-four or thirty weeks the men of “Cambridge” had to “go down,” and when they did, they often fell hard. In a letter to his glorious new Oxford friend Bernard Swithinbank, Lytton Strachey described the horrid fate of his Trinity friend Saxon Sydney-Turner, who, upon leaving Cambridge, had been obliged to get a job.
When I first knew [Sydney-Turner] he was a wild and most unrestrained freshman, who wrote poems, never went to bed, and declaimed Swinburne and Sir Thomas Browne till four o’clock in the morning in the Great Court at Trinity. He is now a Civil Servant at Somerset House, quite pale and inanimate, hardly more than an incompletely galvanized dead body . . . I feel that he’ll be a tragic figure, if only he was aware of his tragedy. But then how can you be sure he isn’t? In appearance he is small, bloodless, and effacé; he looks like some puzzled night animal blinking in the unaccustomed daylight.
Obliged to cede their comfy college sets to the incoming generation, the men of “Cambridge” hauled their trunks off to the far outskirts of the town, where the Victorian brick railway station seemed to symbolize the horrors facing them. Thus, Lytton wrote to Leonard Woolf in April 1905, “when Cambridge is over, when one is cast into the limbo of unintimacy, of business, of ugly antiquity—is there any hope?”
It was out of an unsatisfied longing for their alma mater, lodged in the hearts of Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Desmond MacCarthy, that Bloomsbury grew. By 1904 all these men found themselves scattered about London, Stephen as a reluctant law student, Sydney-Turner as a resigned clerk at Somerset House, MacCarthy as a struggling journalist, Strachey licking his wounds after Trinity’s rejection of his thesis on the statesman Warren Hastings. Bell was also back in London, having spent a year in Paris neglecting the Archives Nationales in favor of the bistros and ateliers of Montmartre. The huge, sprawling metropolis of London could not have been more unlike Cambridge, but it did at least have excellent public transport and, with the Royal Mail delivering three times a day on weekdays, the men of “Cambridge” had no trouble keeping in touch. Even those obliged to slave away for a living or live off their mothers could afford postage stamps, rides on the underground, and the occasional taxi. If all else failed, like their Victorian fathers, they walked. Even spidery Lytton thought nothing of walking ten miles across the city in the small hours of the night.
Thus, when Thoby Stephen announced that cocoa, whiskey, and biscuits (by which he meant something like arrowroot cookies) would be on hand for any friend who cared to call at 46 Gordon Square on Thursdays after dinner, his Cambridge friends, with a kind of desperate enthusiasm, headed for Bloomsbury. “Those Thursday evening parties,” Virginia Woolf later recalled, “were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since been called—in newspapers and in novels, in Germany, in France—even, I daresay in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury.”
Lytton, Clive, Desmond, and Saxon, along with friends and relatives of theirs like James Strachey and Gerald Shove, were drawn to Gordon Square in the first place because “the Goth” had summoned them. By extension, the house in Gordon Square became, in Lytton parlance, “the gothic mansion” and Thoby’s two sisters “the Visigoths.” All the same, the Thursday night “at homes” were not an immediate success. When Vanessa and Virginia evinced an interest in meeting his friends, Thoby saw no way to keep them out of their own living room, and Lytton gloomily reported to Leonard on June 20, 1905: “Later on MacCarthy and I went to the Gothic at home, which is now ruined by the presence of Vanessa and Virginia. Besides them and the Goth there were Gerald Duckworth, Tur
ner and Bell. Very queer. The Goth and Turner have tea regularly in Bell’s rooms in the Temple. The other day I went and it was purely Cambridge.”
In her Memoir Club talk “Old Bloomsbury,” Virginia Woolf explains why she was eager to be present at the “Thursdays.” Her brother Thoby, she says, had “a great power of romanticizing his friends,” and he had described Bell as “an astonishing fellow,” “a perfect horseman,” “a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire.” As for “Strache,” he was a man who read Pope and had French pictures on his walls, “the essence of culture . . . exotic, extreme in every way . . . a prodigy of wit.” Woolf, “a man who trembled all over,” was as remarkable as Bell and Strachey yet quite different, “so violent, so savage; he despised the whole human race.” Too bad he was in exile in Ceylon. As for Turner, he was “an absolute prodigy of learning . . . who had the whole of Greek literature by heart.”
When these demigods actually arrived at Gordon Square, however, shaking off their umbrellas and removing their galoshes, they proved to be rather a letdown to the two young women. Here were no handsome, suave old Etonians in Savile Row suits like George and Gerald Duckworth, but what Henry James memorably called “grubby poodles.” “I had never seen young men so dingy, so lacking in physical splendor,” Virginia Woolf remembered. Almost worse than the appearance of Thoby’s friends were the long, tedious silences that prevailed at the beginning of each Thursday. These astonished Vanessa and Virginia, sitting quiet in the shadows and waiting. They had been trained by their mother to keep the conversational ball rolling. But then one man would raise the question of “good” and its relation to “art,” and suddenly the talk flamed up and grew hot. Thoby’s friends were back in “Cambridge” again, at a meeting of the Apostles or the Midnight Society, and they put down their cocoa and talked.
At first the two women held back, but soon Virginia especially felt able to put her oar in, and when she put her shoulders into the stroke, the men present forgot she was a woman. “It was some abstract question that drew out all our forces,” Virginia recalled, and then
never have I listened so intently to each step and half step in an argument. Never have I been to such pains to sharpen and launch my own little dart . . . It filled me with wonder to watch those who remained in the argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared out of my sight . . . At last, rumpling his hair back, [Saxon] would pronounce very shortly some absolutely final summing up. The marvelous edifice was complete; one could stumble off to bed feeling that something very important had happened.
This was, in Virginia’s memory, the miraculous thing she called “Old Bloomsbury.” It was a place where she was suddenly judged on the quality of her ideas and her information, not her hats or her dress fabrics. Throughout her life, the people she met testified to the extraordinary effect Virginia Woolf had on them, but, especially before her marriage, the sharp brilliance of her mind and the wide range of her reading did not make social life easy for her. Even Virginia’s father, while happy to share his love of ideas and books with her, would have much preferred Thoby to be the writer-scholar and Virginia a normal girl, obsessed with beaus and love letters. But now, in Gordon Square, dressed in her daytime skirt and shirtwaist, Virginia felt able to move out of the shadow, give voice to her ideas, and show what she knew. If someone contradicted her, she argued right back, and the words “I must say you made your point rather well” made her happier than any bouquet of flowers had done in the past.
To be treated as a mind by clever men, to be made a kind of honorary member of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, was a big step in Virginia Woolf’s intellectual development. All the same, by 1907, when, as we shall see in the next chapter, her brother Thoby was dead, she began to realize that something had always been off kilter at the Thursday meetings. To be treated as a man was no longer enough for her; in fact, it rubbed her the wrong way.
In her 1922 account of “Old Bloomsbury” Woolf tried to grapple with the fact that, though she and her sister had been granted membership to an exclusive male club, it was only as Thoby Stephen’s sisters, the “Visigoths.” As independent persons, as women, as themselves, they were still, in some strange way, not present in “Old Bloomsbury.”
I knew theoretically, from books, much more than I knew practically from life. I knew there were buggers in Plato’s Greece; I suspected—it was not a question one could just ask Thoby—that there were buggers in Dr Butler’s Trinity [College] Cambridge; but it never occurred to me that there were buggers even now in the Stephens’ sitting room at Gordon Square. It never struck me that the abstractness, the simplicity which had been so great a relief after Hyde Park Gate was largely due to the fact that the majority of the young men who came there were not attracted by young women. I did not realize that love, far from being a thing they never mentioned, was in fact a thing which they seldom ceased to discuss . . . Those long sittings, those long silences, those long arguments . . . still excited me much more than any men I met with in the outer world of dinners and dances—and yet I was, dare I say it, intolerably bored. Why, I asked, did we have nothing to say to one another? Why were the most gifted of people so barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships almost the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously—as you will have guessed—that there was no physical attraction between us.
I quote Woolf at length here because hers is an acute and important argument as American society, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, debates how men and women can interact in a professional and intellectual context for the benefit of all equally. Desire, Woolf is telling or reminding us, is the stimulus that sets our neurons sparking, that makes the meeting of minds so exciting, so productive. This does not mean that desire must lead inevitably to copulation—to use another favorite Bloomsbury word. But when the current of desire is shut off, things become barren, deadening.
In “Cambridge,” men clear across the spectrum of sexuality were plugged into the circuit of desire, and this gave a passionate intensity to the brief weeks when they were “up” at university. Both Lytton Strachey, an active and ideologically committed homosexual, and Leonard Woolf, a shy, uncertain heterosexual, felt the current of desire, and each was in his own way transformed by it. But women had no part in “Cambridge,” whether as a social structure or as a philosophy. To put it in the terms of twentieth-century feminist theory, women were the alien, the other, the negative to man’s positive, matter to man’s mind, chaos to man’s order, night to man’s day, “0” to man’s “1,” an empty hole fashioned to receive man’s powerful member.
While the Goth lived, the current of desire ran beneath the Thursday meetings and passed through his two sisters. That Vanessa and Virginia both bore a strong physical resemblance to their brother Thoby was not incidental, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the current of desire was already running silently between Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell. But in November 1906, Thoby Stephen died, Vanessa and Virginia both emerged from the shadow of his dominance, and under their leadership the Bloomsbury group took a new social and sexual turn. By 1914 it was already splitting in two directions, which ran close to each other and even joined up at points, but were distinct. In remembrance of Proust, whose great novel was being published at precisely this time, I like to think of them as Vanessa’s Way and Virginia’s Way. How that division came about will be the subject of the next two chapters.
12
The Landmark Year
By the summer of 1906, cracks were developing in the façade of happy life for the four Stephens at 46 Gordon Square. As we saw in Chapter 4, his sale of the Thackeray manuscript had given Thoby Stephen some free money and with it a confidence in his ability to support a family on his fees as a barrister. His sisters knew that their elder brother was intent on finding a wife and that, once Thoby marri
ed and moved out, life would be more difficult. Living expenses would have to be divided by three, not four, and, even with Virginia now in good health and earning a little supplementary income, there would be an unwelcome tightening of the purse strings. Adrian appeared to have no plans beyond his next visit to the opera with Sydney-Turner and his next practical joke, and Vanessa found that she could not trust her younger brother with even simple things, like luggage. On the way to the big society wedding in Somerset of George Duckworth and Lady Margaret Herbert, at which Vanessa was to be bridesmaid, Adrian had managed to leave their bags at Swindon Station. Of course, arriving late by dint of losing track of the bridesmaid’s dress could be interpreted as a Freudian error on the Stephens’ part. They found the thirty-four-year-old bride, whose personal stock of information ran from fish forks to serving game in season, an incredible bore.
Virginia, savoring her new independent life and intent on her writing, was happier in Bloomsbury than she had been since her mother died, so she was alarmed when one day her sister remarked that she supposed that sometime they must all get married. Vanessa was three years older than Virginia, and once Thoby was gone, her status as a single woman would be exposed. Vanessa had been running a household for over ten years, and even the most fuddy-duddy aunties seemed not to expect Miss Stephen to ask an older female relative to live with her. On the other hand, once a woman was accepted by society as old enough to live by herself without a chaperone and take responsibility for her younger siblings, she looked to the world uncomfortably like an old maid.